


By the book

by marysutherland



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crack, Historical, Libraries, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-08
Updated: 2011-12-08
Packaged: 2017-10-27 02:03:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marysutherland/pseuds/marysutherland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock discovers time-travel via the British Library.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Betaed by [Ginbitch](http://ginbitch.livejournal.com/), who should not be blamed for my carelessness with the eighteenth century.
> 
> Warnings: drug-taking and attacks on literature.

Sherlock had once glanced at a novel of John's in which someone claimed that a large enough library could bend space and time, and that all libraries were somehow mystically connected together. Of course, the character who'd noticed this was an orang-utan, so the theory presumably wasn't meant to be taken entirely seriously. He'd thought nothing more of it till the night at the British Library.

He'd broken into the BL because he'd been fed up with the speed of their fetching, and he'd spent a very satisfying few hours reading 1970s biology textbooks (because Mr Sims had got his degree from Reading in 1978, and now Sherlock finally understood why he'd got his ideas about heredity so subtly but crucially wrong). He headed out of the stacks, and only once in the atrium did he open the bottle of water in his pocket and wash the dust out of his mouth. He might technically be an illicit user, but he was prepared to obey _most_ of the library's rules. Indeed, he'd not only reshelved the books he'd been using, but also one or two misplaced volumes he'd noticed. They ought to be grateful to him, really.

As he drank, he found his gaze, as usual, drawn to the King's Library Tower, scanning up and down the vast glass and metal cage filled with leather-bound volumes, till he started to feel dizzy. It was even more potent after the shoddy paper and bindings of the late twentieth century, this sense of solidity, ordered purpose, controlled knowledge. He'd always found attempting to define and memorise the pattern of colours was the perfect way of distracting and relaxing his mind when the noises in it got too much. Tight-packed shades of brown, red, green, flickers of light off gilding, the occasional startling shades of cream and blue: one day he would crack the code.

But now the individual volumes were almost invisible in the dim security lighting, and he was mainly conscious of the vast bulk of the whole thing. Six storeys high, but you could almost imagine that it went even higher and lower, a column of books that could take you from the depths of the earth to the heavens. He never quite understood why they called it a library. Oh, of course, it was a working library, you could request books from there, he'd even done it once, but it didn't look like one. The gaps between the shelves were almost nominal, he wondered if they needed specially slender book-fetchers, or perhaps children, bred to this one task. What it really was, he suddenly realised, was the core of a book-powered reactor, it was that that kept the library alive, even in the depths of night. He knew the humming was really the heating and security systems – must remember, no more than eight minutes more here in order to avoid the patrol – but he could imagine it came from the tower itself.

On an impulse, he went down to the first floor, to the sole entrance, easing his way in silently through the white-painted gates marked 'Staff only', and went to stand by the heavy black metal doors that led into the tower itself. He didn't attempt to open them, there were probably all kinds of alarms that would set off. And besides, if you opened the doors, wouldn't it breach some kind of containment field, so that the concentrated force of knowledge would flow out, dissipate? But how could even four inches of solid metal stop that? And the doors weren't completely solid, but patterned with small square holes, and even now he wasn't sure if they were windows into the collection, or mirrors to reflect the readers back at themselves. No, they were windows to something, to the power inside. For reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with logic, he leant his head on one door, and then slipped off his gloves – risky, might leave fingerprints, but they'd surely never check – and placed both palms on the doors, pressing in almost imperceptibly. Words in his mind, words in there, imagine them swirling round together visible in the air, no, imagine his mind sucking in the knowledge from there, it seeping in through his pores, flowing through his blood. The doors are giving beneath his touch, even though he is barely pressing them. But still, the metal and the glass are melting like ice at the heat of his hands...

Looking up, he steps into the tower, but it isn't the glass and metal box anymore, buta long dark library, wooden shelves stacked with barely-visible heavy volumes, which he somehow knows are not quite the same ones as before. When he gets his pencil torch out, the titles of the books blur beneath his gaze, gold-blocked letters dancing incomprehensibly, but he realises that there are heavy wooden doors at the end of each bay. He chooses one and swings it open cautiously, and walls into another library. For a split second he thinks he's in the old British Museum Reading Room, which he bluffed his way into, aged fifteen. Then he realises that this room is not round, but octagonal, and almost empty of people. The only occupants are an elderly white-wigged man arguing with a bloated oaf in a waistcoat. They don't look up at him, just carry on their heated discussion about the civil list.

He deduces 'film set for historical drama' in 10 seconds, 'One of the King Georges' in 25, and 'actually, not a film set' in 30 seconds. Which leaves historical re-enactment , or mental confusion on either his part or that of the men in breeches. He goes over to them, smiles, and sticks out his hand.

"Sherlock Holmes," he announces, "the world's only consulting detective."

They don't react to him by as much as a blink, which suggests it's his dream, not theirs. He wanders round the library briefly; he can pull the books off the shelves here, read them. He glances at the title page of one: 'An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism'. The date is 1774, which gives him a lower bound for the period, if his dream is being logical. Though could his unconscious mind really have come up with a title like that? And the whole thing is far more prosaic than his normal dreams. Somebody is usually dead by this point in them, but there is no sign of upcoming murder, despite the continuing argument of the men behind him.

What now? There are doors at opposite sides of the octagon: some instinct tells him to head towards the one on the right, it is somehow, brighter, clearer. He walks towards it, through it, into shadows, and his legs abruptly ram into the brass-topped railings round the Tower. Once he's stopped swearing and looked round, there is the rest of the modern BL.

***

Having hallucinations less than 24 hours into a case suggested there was something wrong with him, but the alternative was...peculiar. Once he'd sorted out Mr Sims and his twin, he went off to the reference books. The results, as he'd expected, were inconclusive.George III's books had been housed in a library, the Octagonal Library, that looked remarkably like the room he'd been in, and he was sure he'd never seen a picture of that before. But while the older man might plausibly have been George III, the fat lump he'd been arguing with fitted Gillray's savage caricatures of George IV more than the portraits he could find. There was something _odd_ going on.

***

It took him nearly a month to become a night security guard at the BL, because he knew he would require some time to experiment. It was also handy not to be hanging around 221B at night, when John was doing unnecessarily provocative things, like lying in his bedroom in his pyjamas. Probably in his pyjamas. Sherlock needed something he could explore safely.

It is surprisingly easy to repeat the dream, or non-dream, once he's focused on the books in the Tower. This time, there is no-one there in the Octagonal Library, or in the other rooms around it. The next thing is some tangible proof. He pulls a book off the shelf and then stops. He'd thought he was capable of anything, but he cannot bring himself to deface the innocent volume he holds, let alone remove it from the library. He puts the book carefully back in its place and looks round. There must be a way out of the library into the rest of the palace.

He finds a small door which leads into someone's bedroom, the king's he presumes, for all its bare floors. He waits for the maid he sees in there to start screaming, but she doesn't, even when he sits on the bed and calls her an idiot. He's definitely imperceptible, which is a strange, but somehow enjoyable situation. He looks round for something to take back with him, something distinctive that has to come from here, not there. Then he spots a small, beautifully patterned box on a sideboard and pockets it. The maid gives a gasp and hurries out. Oh, so objects that I move are perceptible, just not me, he thinks.

In a moment of clarity, as if his mental database of London streets has suddenly developed a supplement to eighteenth century palaces, he knows that if he goes through the door into the dressing room and then turns right, he will find the way back into his world. Time to check if his instinct's right, he thinks, and cautiously takes the route emblazoned in his mind. Sure, enough he finds himself back in 2010.

***

"A client sent me this as a reward," he announced to John the next morning, producing the box. "We need to check if it's been stolen."

"Have you ever considered having honest clients?" John asked.

"Far less profitable. It's a silver snuff box, late eighteenth century, I'd say, Belongs, belonged to George III, I believe."

"You've been watching _Antiques Roadshow_ again?"

"Time to check where it's supposed to be. If it's been stolen, I'd expect it to be from somewhere in London, the thief wouldn't have time and opportunity to go elsewhere. So can you take a picture and go and talk to Grinling at the Art and Antiques Unit?" He really hoped that he hadn't stolen the box during some blackout or psychotic episode, because that would come under John's 'definitely not good' heading.

John was still looking at the box with an extreme distaste that had nothing to do with aesthetic judgement.

"It's heavy," he said, picking it up gingerly from the coffee table. "Do you think there's something in it?"

He hadn't thought of that. "Let's have a look," he replied, reaching for the box.

"No!" John yelled. "Gloves, don't open it without gloves. There might be some contraption inside."

"You're getting paranoid, John," Sherlock said scornfully, but he did slip on his gloves before cautiously opening the box. "You see, nothing but snuff."

"Could be poisoned, definitely carcinogenic."

"I'll analyse it," Sherlock said patiently, and added quickly, "In the lab, not here."

John still looked concerned. He wondered about giving John a reassuring hug, but he suspected John was getting suspicious about who was being reassured. So he settled for what he hoped was a genial smile.

"If we find this is genuine, I don't think I'll need to take any cases for a couple of weeks," he said. "Which is good, because I'll need to do some time-travelling in the British Library."

"I'll take that as a metaphor for historical research," John retorted. "Now do you want some breakfast before you go back to the future?"

***

Sherlock couldn't work out the central mystery of how or why, but he could at least explore the mechanisms and the constraints. The journey always seemed to start from what he had come to term the library portal, but the door that allowed his return could be anywhere. As long as he could calm his mind, he never had problems knowing instinctively where it would be. He had not yet detected any consistent relationship between the different doors within the portal and his exit point, but he had worked out that he could transport himself to a specific library, or even just a collection of books, if he concentrated on it hard enough.

It was probably just as well that he was not limited to the King's Library. The ability to see him was apparently inversely related to rationality: to most people he was invisible, but not to animals, small children, drunks, and lunatics. He was fairly sure that he was not doing George III's chances of recovery any good, given his alarmed reaction when he noticed him. What was more, George when mad was no less tedious than when he was lucid.

He wished he could control the when of his movement as easily as he could control the where, but his temporal imagination seemed to be far weaker than his spatial one. He normally ended up in the later eighteenth century, but concentrating hard on a particular event could sometimes force him to appear near it. He couldn't escape from the Georgians yet, though. Still, at least he hadn't got stuck with the Tudors.

***

The experiments at conquering time and space distracted him for a while from the fact that experiencingthe Georgian world soon lost its thrill. He always wore boots now, in case he had to go outside, but the smell of a world with insufficient soap and too many horses lingered on them, and on everything else he wore. He wondered if John ever noticed, and if that was why he sometimes kept his distance from Sherlock.And with no-one he wanted to talk to able to perceive him, it was oddly underwhelming being in the past, unless you were a would-be poltergeist or kleptomaniac. If he wasn't interested in the current Prime Minister, why should he care whether somebody assassinatedPercival Spencer, or whatever his name was? He needed someone to come with him and share the experience.

Fortunately, he'd trained John sufficiently that when he said they were going on a dangerous night-time mission to the British Library, John simply asked if he needed to come armed. (He'd decided not; if he could drop a pound coin off London Bridge and almost knock a hole in a barge, they could possibly cause an earthquake in Lisbon with a gun). When they got to the atrium that night, he wondered for a moment about just having John watch while he transferred himself, so he could find out exactly what happened when his own body started seeping through the tower.But leaving John alone in such a bizarre situation was almost bound to end badly. He sometimes felt that leaving John alone anywhere that wasn't a securely guarded 221B was rather risky.

So instead he showed John how to lean against the tower; he suspected that telling him to imagine pouring himself into the library shelves wasn't going to be much use. Then Sherlock wrapped himself around him, bare hands braced to either side of John's, their cheeks almost touching as their foreheads leant side by side against the heavy doors. John's spine was stiffening – he was long since resigned to Sherlock messing with his mind, but he could still get twitchy when Sherlock started messing with his body. But they had to stay in contact, Sherlock was sure, for this to work. If he could get it to work.

It's so hard: the metal doesn't just evaporate beneath his fingers, he has to force it with hands, his mind, the dead weight of John's prosaicness dragging him back. But they break through at last, and Sherlock hustles John through the portal before he can stop and wonder what is going on. In less than a minute they emerge into a bookshop he knows near St Paul's. He doesn't think wandering through a palace will suit John, he'll worry he isn't smartly enough dressed.

John stands in the bookshop, blinking, as Sherlock rapidly surveys the evidence for their date. Grub Street Journal, prints of Walpole and Turnip Townsend, an article about the recent visit of some Cherokee Indian chiefs...Daylight outside, which is good, probably summer, but he can check in a moment. John is still just standing there, blinking.

"Aren't you going to ask where we are?" Sherlock says at last.

"I'm not sure I want to know."

"You're in London, Paternoster Row."

"I see. It's just..." John comes to a halt, licking his lips nervously.

"Do you want to know when we are?"

"It's not 2010 then?"

"1730, probably summer. I'll try and get a sun sight when we get outside. Are you OK, John?"

"Have I gone mad? Am I on drugs?"

"No to both."

"Is Mycroft involved in any way?"

"No."

"Then I'm fine. Probably fine. You've discovered time travel, then?" John doesn't sound quite as impressed as Sherlock had hoped.

"Something like that, yes," he replies.

"But you know how you get us back to the present?"

"Yes, that's no problem."

"Right. Well, anytime you feel like you're ready for the twenty-first century, that's fine by me. What do we do now?"

"We go out and do some sightseeing, John. Welcome to eighteenth century London!"


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock has discovered time-travel via the British Library. But when he takes John on a tour of eighteenth century London, not everything goes according to plan.

It becomes apparent extremely quickly that John does not like chronological tourism. He moans about the smell, and the state of his shoes, though that's his fault for not wearing wellingtons, as Sherlock had advised. Then he moans about the food and the beer. He has the look of a man who'd like to moan about the drunken mothers suckling their babies on street corners, and the one-legged beggars, but can't think of any comments that aren't just long strings of swearwords.

"You've been in third world countries before," Sherlock points out. "Surely this isn't much different."

"Yeah, but that was over there. This is here, my home. Was my home, will be my home."

"That's not the spirit that made the British army great."

"Yeah, well it isn't great at the moment, is it? It's the scum of the earth, and I feel about the scummiest right now." John relapses into a silence that Sherlock considers distinctly mulish.

***

It's a Saturday afternoon, which is handy, so Sherlock decided it's best to treat this as a short weekend break. Give John an evening out, find a reasonable hotel, wander around the city a bit on Sunday morning, when it'll be quieter, and then head home. What would be best for the evening? He has a strong suspicion that John's ideas of entertainment don't extend to attending public hangings. (Besides, he's got all the data he needs from them already). John not really into classical music, and the last time Sherlock went to the theatre here, he ended up screaming himself hoarse telling an oblivious audience that _King Lear_ was not supposed to end happily. Then he overhears someone mentioning that the Bartholomew Fair is on. He'll take John off to Smithfield for that, try and find some acrobats, that might cheer him up.

That works out quite well – John enjoys the slack rope dancers and the rest of the show, especially given the lack of Chinese gangsters. He does mutter a bit that if he's going to be ignored or bumped into by hordes of smelly Londoners he could just go on the Tube. But even that has its compensations , once Sherlock points out that if John stands sufficiently close to him he's less likely to get jostled. All in all, it's an encouraging evening.

Sherlock has made a clever choice of hotel for afterwards, he thinks. Respectable, clean, likely to be almost filled up, so he can explain to John how sharing a hotel bed is standard practise in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, there are no spare beds at all – extra customers with the fair on, presumably - and John freaks out about sharing a bed with someone who can't see him.

"It's straightforward," Sherlock says. "You get in the bed, you maybe nudge them a bit, use a candlestick if necessary, and they either budge over or decide the room's haunted and leave."

"No!" John yells. "I, I, no...just no."

So they spend the night roaming the streets of London, which seems to calm John down after a while. Perhaps in the darkness he finds it easier to forget when he is, to imagine he and Sherlock are adrift in the more insalubrious bits of modern London. By dawn, Sherlock thinks it safe to introduce the idea of coming back in time again. They can bring supplies, of course, choose somewhere to go that John might find interesting.

"Any time in the eighteenth century, and even a bit of the nineteenth," says Sherlock, as they watch a cart jam begin to form on London Bridge, "and it's not limited to London either. If I can find enough print to concentrate on, I can go anywhere. So what I was wondering about was the Battle of Waterloo. Don't you think that would be a fascinating spectacle? Or would you prefer Culloden?"

"Do you take me for a bloody war tourist?" John shouts, and stalks off in disgust.

***

That is when it really goes wrong. Because of chasing after an indignant John, he lets the two maps of London in his head, past and present, unmesh temporarily, so that he doesn't realise till it's too late that John's instinctive aim of getting out of London somehow means they're heading into the Old Nichol slums near Shoreditch. But of course, Sherlock's real error was made long before that. He hadn't worked out the probabilities correctly...

He knows that there are people in Georgian London who are desperate enough to steal the clothes off your back, that there are armed men, that there are mentally disturbed people. He should have thought about the intersection of all three groups, especially in the rougher areas of London. Above all, if there's a clothes thief with a jack-knife around, psychotic enough to be able to see them, Sherlock should have realised that he'd target the normal-sized man with the warm-looking jumper, obviously a stranger to the city, rather than the confident giant with the fancy coat on.

***

Which is why, early on that Sunday morning, there's now a man bleeding to death on the pavement. John hadn't planned him to kill him, of course – Sherlock's almost certain of that – but the attack was so sudden and frenzied that John and the man both went down in a flurry, and somehow the knife ended up in the man's side, not John's. John became eerily calm then, crouching over the body, pressing at the wound, ordering Sherlock to dial 999. It took Sherlock several minutes repeating it till John registered that 1730 has no ambulances, no paramedics. And then John just stood up slowly, and walked away from the dying man, his hand shaking, looking as if he would have liked to throw up if he could only find a bit of gutter clean enough.

So it's Sherlock watching over the dying man. Macheath, his name is, according to his sidekick, a wiry little rat of a man, who's obviously disturbed enough to see them, but not quite vicious enough to try anything. Sherlock isn't quite sure at first why the second man has emerged from the shadows, and started chatting to him, as Macheath's life oozes away. Then he realises that he's staying around so he can rifle Macheath's body when he's dead. Possibly steal his boots as well, given his covetous glances at them. Better get John out of the way before he sees that bit.

"I'll leave you in peace to say your farewells to your friend," he says. "I think it's time to go home, John. Come this way."

John's jumper is stained with Macheath's blood and he looks grey with shock, but he responds to Sherlock's voice, and it doesn't take Sherlock long to find his way back to the BL. He drags John into one of the toilets and starts trying to clean him up. It's only when he has John's jumper off – it's never going to be the same again, is it? – that Sherlock realises that not all the blood on it had been Macheath's. There's a nasty gash down the inside of John's right arm.

"You should have said," he protests. "If I'd known you were injured, I could have done something immediately."

"It wasn't bleeding that much," John replies. "I thought it'd probably stop on its own."

"You should have let me bandage it up right after the attack."

"I didn't want that. What I want," John says, with the exaggerated calm of someone who's only an inch away from shoving Sherlock's head down a toilet, "is for you to find a first aid box right now. Because that will have sterile dressings in it. Sterile is good in these situations, sterile is very, very good."

As he hurries off, Sherlock thinks: I should have knowngoing time travelling with a doctor wouldn't be straightforward.

***

He'd managed to get John severely pissed offwith both himself and time travel, Sherlock thought, which was not good. On the other hand, he was used to talking John round. So the first thing to do was to prove that Macheath was really not a nice man, and that Georgian London would be better off with him dead than alive.

Unfortunately, while his investigations showed Macheath was definitely not nice, they also revealed that he'd technically never been alive. Unless someone in the real Georgian world decided to name themselves after a character in _The Beggar's Opera_ \- which implied a level of obsession that was frankly worrying - John had accidentally killed someone fictional. In a way that also had disturbing echoes of a twentieth-century song about Macheath.

So, Sherlock thought, hypothesise a worldthat is somehow created by the books in the tower, the pressure of their words, fact and fiction compressed together to create some alternative reality. In that alternative reality, Sherlock was pretty certain that Macheath was actually dead, or at least gone to meet his maker, whether God, John Gay, or some omniscient Library Syndicate. He'd seen numerous corpses already in the other world, because dying was what eighteenth century people did.

Which did suggest all kinds of possibilities for _rewriting_ the past. Of course he wouldn't try that if it was definitely the real past, because if you did you might rip a hole in the fabric of space/time and end up with the Nazis back in power. At least that was what happened judging by the books on time travel he'd hurriedly read. And, he told himself, if you can't trust at least some of the books you read, what are you doing in a damn library anyhow? But changing a few stories would be spectacular, but more or less harmless.

He concluded a few days later – it had turned out to be a three lecture problem – that tampering with Georgian literature wasn't likely to be much of a thrill. If he did manage to insert a plot into _Tristram Shandy_ , or even explain to Robinson Crusoe some of the more interesting things he might do with Man Friday, who would actually notice other than a few obsessive scholars? And people had already stuck wet shirts and zombies into Jane Austen, he couldn't top that. Then it occurred to him. Why not cut off 200 years of prejudice against scientists at the root, by stopping Victor Frankenstein creating his monster?

For some reason, however, he couldn't make it work. He travelled to Ingolstadt, to Geneva, even to Thonon-les-Bains,seekingFrankenstein, and he couldn't find him. He lost count of how many volumes of Cornelius Agrippa he removed from obscure Alpine villages, so he could at least stop Frankenstein getting ideas. But every time he got back to 2010, Mary Shelley's mad scientist was still there on the page. Something wouldn't let him remove that story.

***

Sherlock eventually decided he was wasting his time trying to change fiction. People weren't really interested in it. Certain people. Certain people who lived in 221B Baker Street. If he was going to convince John of the wonders of time-travel, he needed something more tangible. Perhaps he could go back and kill a tyrant or two, make the world a better place in that way.The problem was, however, that the only target he could think of was Napoleon, and he couldn't help feeling that if anything was going to start ripping holes in the fabric of something or other, it would be finishing _him_ off prematurely. And he was strangely uncomfortable with the concept of 'ripping' and 'books' getting too close to one another.

Besides, he couldn't be sure whether John might consider premeditated assassination of anyone a bit not good, even someone who was definitely not a nice man. Even worse, he suspected hewouldn't get a helpful answer from John if he tried to check in advance. John knew that Sherlock was still going back to the eighteenth century, but he was trying very hard to ignore the fact. Indeed an extra alternative reality was being forcibly created in 221B by John's mind, in which Sherlock was not doing anything weirder than normal.

Perhaps, rather than killing, Sherlock thought, what he needed to do was save someone's life in the past, so they have time to write more words, more books for the libraryverse. Unfortunately, his two favoured candidates for saving, Lavoisier and Galois, were tricky. He suspected it was harder to rescue people from the guillotine than the Scarlet Pimpernel made it look, and Galois' death in a duel wasn't till 1832, later than he'd ever been able to travel. It also wouldn't be the same saving your hero's life if they didn't even notice it was you that had done it. And would saving the lives of even brilliant chemists and mathematicians be enough to impress John? Really impress him?

But saving _something_ was definitely a good idea. George III's snuff box was still sitting on the mantelpiece of 221B; that hadn't evaporated or exploded. So if he could find an object, he could preserve it, rescue it. Then, when he was walking into the BL one evening, it occurred to him, and it suddenly seemed so obvious. He'd been to their exhibitions often enough to know about the Ashburnham House fire, when a sizeable part of Sir Robert Cotton's collection of medieval manuscripts went up in smoke. The surviving volumes had ended up in the British Library, but there were things lurking in their archives that were more carefully preserved chunks of ash than anything readable. He didn't care much about manuscripts, himself, but it would undoubtedly please the library if he rescued a few more. And preserving the nation's literary heritage surely counted as patriotic, didn't it? John would approve of that.

***

It took weeks of planning in both centuries, though possibly the same weeks, because time in the two worlds didn't run entirely in sync. (When Sherlock thought about it, the obvious explanation was that if you can lose track of time when you're reading a really good book, time in a book-created world is going to be relativistic, not fixed). He had to make repeated trial runs till he could get back reliably to the right date, and had observed the fire frequently enough to know when and where to move in. Then he had to read up on what exactly got burned and make his wish-list of volumes to save. It was at that point that he realised it was a two-man job, if he was going to get everything he wanted. So he needed to rope John in again, which was not going to be simple.

Somehow, however, he persuaded John to come along, with the promise of rescues from burning buildings to be effected. Sherlock perhaps underplayed the saving valuable manuscripts angle, as opposed to saving poor innocent bystanders, but John eventually agreed to help just this once, and accompanied Sherlock back to the BL. This time in clothes he really didn't care about, and with ample supplies of food and medical equipment.

***

It goes wrong yet again, of course. John's mental drag on them manages to throw Sherlock's temporal positioning out by a crucial fraction and they end up several days too early. He supposes they could break into Ashburnham House in advance, and remove the most important manuscripts before the fire, or even just put the fire out before it gets too big, but that would be much less exciting. He's promised John danger, and he's not going to get away now with simply offering the chance to reshelve some dusty volumes, or remove flammable materials. But the delay means that the coffee John is prepared to drink runs out too soon, which doesn't help his increasing grumpiness. John moans at length about the heartlessness of Georgian society and the inadequacies of London's infrastructure, and it doesn't seem to help telling him that it'll all work out fine in 100 years time.

The other problem is that Sherlock gets so fed up with John's moans about the eighteenth century that he starts tuning him out, and doesn't pay enough attention to John's other complaint, that he thinks someone is watching them. He doesn't register, till it's too late, the implications of his own thoughts that it's only kleptomaniacs and poltergeists who could really enjoy this version of the past. He's also forgotten that he isn't the only inquisitive mind wandering around modern-day London. And the biggest mistake of all, when it's finally the night of the fire, is that he doesn't stay with John, but has them split up for maximum effectiveness in saving manuscripts. He can't understand afterwards how he could have been so reckless...

***

He is emerging from the choking smoke of the library – he hadn't realised before quite how noxious burning vellum is – with a stack of bound volumes, when he spots two figures approaching, moving to block his path. He is still trying to work out who exactly they are, and how they can see him, when they draw close enough that their features are highlighted by the glare from the flames. Moriarty, brushing the ash off his smart suit. And John, trussed up beside him, with a look in which his normal dogged stoicism on such occasions is mixed with something that says he is really, really pissed-off with the eighteenth century. Once Sherlock gets close enough, he can see that what is strapped round John is a bandolier full of black powder cartridges. With a fuse attached to it. And Moriarty is holding a lighter in the hand that he isn't keeping behind his back. Oh, shit, Sherlock thinks.

"Good evening," Moriarty says, smiling one of his more deranged smiles. "So nice to run into you at last. I've been looking forward to this. It's time to play my little game: 'Whose turn to burn?' So, to start with, have you borrowed any good books?"

"I've got the Nowell codex of _Beowulf_ ,Cotton Genesis, Gildas, some Otho A volumes-"

"Glad to see you picked out the valuable stuff. I just _knew_ you'd do your homework. So, on the one hand, we have some of the world's most important manuscripts. On the other, we have John. Which one do you let burn, which one do you save? Really, it seems to me quite easy, because no-one's going to remember Johnny-boy here in 50 years time, let alone 250. On the other hand, the way you're neglecting your little pet, it can't be long till the RSPCA decides to prosecute you."

"I'll give you all the manuscripts if you let John go."

"Oh, Sherlock, darling," Moriarty is giggling now. "You don't think this is about stealing things, do you? That would be _boring_! No, tonight is about burning the heart out of things, because I like fires. So, first of all, you're going to put all the books you're carrying on the ground, and you're going to open them up, because things burn better like that. And then, I've got a little bottle of something for you."

"I'm sorry, I'm not drinking this evening," Sherlock says, as he bends and slowly lowers the volumes onto the flagstones. The fuse of the slow match probably gives John five minutes once it's lit, and Sherlock's got gloves on, so he can put out the fuse with his hands. But if he's wrong about the burn rate, or Moriarty throws the lighter at John, or the flying fragments of burning manuscript which are already drifting around in the wind get too close, the cartridges may blow up immediately. He must do exactly what Moriarty says.

"Catch," said Moriarty, and throws a small plastic bottle at him. Sherlock catches it, opens it – making sure he doesn't spill any of the liquid it contains - and sniffs.

"Petrol? Not very authentic."

"Oh, but they'll be very eighteenth century flames," Moriarty replies. "Make sure you get it all over the manuscripts now, we don't want anything left over."

Sherlock pours over the liquid, throws the bottle behind him – no-one's going to notice it amid the debris – and waits. Trying to calculate flash points and speeds and angles, and knowingthat the answer is: 'I wouldn't start from here, if I were you'. Here's hoping Moriarty doesn't want the Westwood singed, and he'llretreat once he's lit the blue touchpaper. He's reaching inside his coat now, and Sherlock wonders if he's going for a gun. But of course, it's another lighter, and for a moment Moriarty just stands there flicking the lighters in each hand, as if he's the world's campest gun-slinger. Then he yells: "Time to play," and as one lighter arcs towards the pile of manuscripts, the other one licks the end of the fuse attached to John...

Afterwards, Sherlock is proud that he doesn't even stop to check whether the manuscripts have caught light, the 'woompf' as they go up merely an irrelevant detail. His whole focus is on John, as he rushes up to him, and grabs the fuse, crushing the flame in his hand. Then he half-pushes, half-carries John, as they run, run into the dark, hoping that Moriarty will have stared at the burning books for just long enough to wreck his night vision. Round a corner, duck into a dim alley, he has his tiny torch out now, he's dragging John by the hand, and he can hear how near he is to collapse. So, back him against a wall that doesn't look too collapsible, and then the clasp knife's out, and he's cutting through the cords holding the cartridge belt onto John. Rip it off, and then hold John up as the adrenaline rush gives out, and his legs fold. For five minutes, perhaps, or maybe a lifetime, John is solid and alive and panting against Sherlock's chest, clinging onto him like he's a drowning man and Sherlock is a life raft. Then John looks up, and says, trying to smile:

"For a criminal genius, he's bloody repetitive, isn't he?"

Sherlock smiles back. "Always has been. Why five pips, rather than three? Are you OK to move? I can support you if you need it."

"Probably OK on my own, just don't go too fast. Can we go home?"

"Yes, but I need to make sure we've shaken Moriarty off, so it may need to be a bit of an indirect route."

"OK," John says, and then with a desperate effort, adds: "Ready when you are."

***

He got John back to 211B eventually, though John was grimly silent, and practically walking into walls from exhaustion by the end of the trek. Not that Sherlock was feeling exactly chatty, because it was hard to escape the notion that he had comprehensively screwed up everything. On the positive side, he had proved that John was literally beyond price for him, and apart from a few rope burns, he didn't think John was injured this time. On the negative side, he'd nearly got him killed again, and been outwitted by Moriarty, and managed to get the only manuscript of _Beowulf_ burnt to a cinder. Not a good few days' work. Still, at least nothing more could go wrong...

It was only when he'd got John safely at the flat, that it dawned on him that he was wrong about that as well. His next night shift at the BL was supposed to start an hour ago, and given that he was already on his last written warning for performance, they were not going to be happy about that.

***

"Evening, Sherlock," his shift supervisor greeted him. "Still not got the hand of which is the big hand and which is the little hand on your fancy watch? Or has someone yet again fallen under the Tube train you were on? It's almost like the suicides are targeting you, isn't it?"

"You need to check the Cotton manuscripts," Sherlock announced. "I, I overheard there was a plan to try and steal the _Beowulf_ codex, and several other manuscripts as well. I was investigating that, that's why I'm late. We need to make sure they're all OK, nothing's happened to them. I've got a list of the shelfmarks to check here." He started scribbling them down.

"You're kidding, aren't you?" the supervisor replied, but when Sherlock stared at him, somethingmust have registered. "OK, you're not. But, we haven't got access to half this stuff, it's all in the strong rooms. I'll need to get one of the curators to investigate."

"How soon can we get hold of someone?"

"Realistically, tomorrow morning. Have you got anything definite about what's being planned or when? Is it some kind of raid?"

"Break in," said Sherlock. "I don't know the details, but...," He paused, and then went on. "There's a friend of mine got quite close to the ringleader. I need to check if he's got any more information, if he's OK."

" _You've_ got a fr-, OK, you go and check on him. Tell him not to do anything rash. If someone is planning something big, it could be dangerous. I'll get the rest of the team on high alert, do a sweep of the building."

***

"I need to speak to _Mr_ Holmes," the voice on the phone said the next morning. BL manuscript curator, thirty-something, married, normally very pleasant, but she'd come in early at the supervisor's special request to check out the possibly stolen manuscripts, and she hadn't liked the result. But she was cross, not worried, which meant, which meant...

"Speaking."

"I don't know what you think you're playing at, but the British Library's not here for your personal amusement."

"The manuscripts are all OK?"

"They are fine, nothing has been touched. I checked every shelf mark you gave me and there's nothing, no sign of any disturbance. But we found your tie."

"My _tie_?"

"Well I presume it was your little game to leave it there? As a clue, maybe, while you pretend to be some kind of detective hero?"

"Can you tell me what you're talking about, please?"

"There was a tie found in the atrium, tied to the railings round the Tower. Put there some time during the night."

"What did it look like?"

"Black with skulls on it. And it had blood stains on it. Not a very funny joke, Mr Holmes. I don't think the British Library is really the right place for you to be working. Good day."

***

" _Beowulf_ is safe," Sherlock announced, bursting into the bathroom where John was lurking. "Good news for scholarship, bad news for declension-hating students."

John was staring at his tongue in the mirror. "Right, erm, what?"

"The manuscripts that were burnt yesterday? They weren't burnt after all. Not in this world. Nothing happened."

"What do you mean nothing happened? Those books you were trying to save, they went up in flames. I saw them. And I've still got the lump on my skull where Moriarty coshed me. Or are you telling me that I imagined all that? Because if I've started dreaming about the eighteenth century, I need psychiatric help right now."

"Causality," said Sherlock. "It doesn't fit. You can get hurt, maybe even killed, but the books are OK. Why?"

"Don't know, don't care, I'm going back to bed. Can you phone the surgery, please, and say I think I'm coming down with something, and I'm afraid I won't be in today."

"Oh, of course." It all made sense now. "People aren't immortal in that world, books are. That might seem entirely logical to some kind of...entities."

"Excuse me?"

"And that explains Moriarty's tie."

"Nothing explains that," John said firmly. "Who wants to go around with skulls on their tie?"

"He was wearing that yesterday, wasn't he?"

"He obviously keeps that and the suit for special occasions, like when planning to blow me up. You know, Sherlock, I didn't enjoy that in the twenty-first century either."

"Well, the good news, John, is that something nasty may have happened to Moriarty this time."

"Sounds good. What?"

"I don't know. But don't you think that a partially sentient library might get very pissed-off with someone who deliberately burns books?"


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something nasty in the library stacks may have got Moriarty, but there are other dangers lurking in the eighteenth century for John and Sherlock.

Sherlock's positive mood survived for a few days, but started to unravel when it became clear that he'd managed to do something unforeseen to John's subconscious, something that went beyond his normal reactions to Sherlock nearly getting him killed. (He also felt slightly guilty about the fact that John now _had_ a normal reaction to Sherlock nearly getting him killed). The problem this time was that John didn't want to leave the flat, disappeared up to his room when Mrs Hudson appeared, and, in fact, gave every impression of not wanting to come into contact with anyone except Sherlock.

When Sherlock found the thermometer left by the basin one morning, it dawned on him. John wasn't sick, but he was worried he might have caught something in the eighteenth century. So what could it be? And why hadn't John gone for medical tests, which was the obvious thing to do? It took him several patches and quite a bit of research to work that one out, and then he bounced up to John, sprawled in his chair, eating toast and watching crap telly.

"You do know that smallpox requires prolonged exposure to spread it?" he announced. "And that you're not contagious during the incubation period, anyhow?"

John practically choked on his mouthful, and Sherlock ended up slapping him on the back more than strictly necessary.

"There were people there with pustules," John said, switching off the TV. "Smallpox can be spread by bedding and clothing as well. We were in some horribly insanitary places, and we should have thought of the risk before."

"There's no reason to think we're going to pick anything up."

"Why not? I get knifed there, and I'm still injured here. You pick up a snuff box, and it and the contents survive. What stops us bringing a virus back?"

At least with John, you got vaguely evidence-based paranoia, Sherlock thought. "The chances are vanishingly small."

"It's bloody smallpox, Sherlock. The only disease they've ever eradicated from the whole world and you want to risk bringing it back?"

"So why haven't you gone to Barts? Or the London School of Tropical Medicine or whoever? We can go there right now, if you like."

"And how exactly do we explain how we might have been exposed to smallpox? Got any ideas, genius?"

"Tricky," Sherlock had to admit. "I'd rather not get into the time travel aspect. For one thing, I suspect Mycroft would get involved, and I really don't want him near any past world where America's still part of the British Empire. He'd be terribly tempted to interfere in some way."

"And I don't want to be suspected of bioterrorism," John retorted. "You're right. I'm not infectious yet, and if we just wait out the incubation period, it'll probably be fine. It's just-"

"Your subconscious is screaming, 'Plague, plague, I'm going to die a hideous death and so is anyone I so much as breath on'?"

"Something like that, yeah."

"But you don't feel the need to stay away from me?"

"If you die of smallpox, my subconscious would reckon that served you right."

"I see your point." He wondered if would have to break the habit of a lifetime and actually apologise, but fortunately John knew better than to expect that. Instead, John simply smiled a little wanly, and said:

"I know I'm overreacting. It's just...will you promise me something?"

"Of course," he said and, just for a moment, meant it, because John asked so little from him, and he asked so much of John.

"Don't go back to...there, unless you've been vaccinated. I know it's a very small risk, but even so..."

Sherlock decided immediately to make the promise and weasel out of it later.

"That's fine, I'll make sure I do that," he said, smiling at John. "Now is there anything enjoyable you want to do while we put ourselves into quarantine? Oh, and do you need me to check you anywhere for rashes? Anywhere you can't easily check yourself?"

***

Whatever John might consciously think, his inner public health official was convinced that he was now the equivalent of Typhoid Mary, so he was most relaxed staying in 221B. And he let Sherlock check him for rashes with surprising regularity, and even allowed him to feel his forehead quite a bit for the first signs of any fever. Which almost made up for the fact that John took the opportunity to increase Sherlock's knowledge of popular culture (which involved watching a lot of rather tedious DVDs). Sherlock was also beginning to suspect that John might have outwitted him on the vaccination front. In order to get hold of smallpox vaccine, he needed the kind of paperwork that would almost certainly attract Mycroft's attention. Some lateral thinking was needed, he decided.

***

"I need to go to Liverpool tomorrow to see some people who research voles," Sherlock told John ten days later.

"Voles?" John said absent-mindedly, looking through the newspaper. "Do they have them in Liverpool?"

"Possibly they import them specially for the research." He had concocted several plausible explanations as to why he needed to learn about voles, and why John couldn't come with him, but fortunately they weren't needed.

"I need to go to the surgery tomorrow," John said, "Grovel to Sarah as to why it's taken me more than a fortnight to recover properly from flu."

"I still think you should have told her it was amoebic dysentery. Less...boring."

"She's a GP, she's not going to be impressed or even sympathetic for anything short of leprosy. I was reckoning we might watch _Citizen Kane_ tonight, if that's OK."

"I have to get a very early train tomorrow."

"OK. Tomorrow night, then?"

Try and be helpful, Sherlock, he told himself, because John's not going to be happy when he finds out what you're planning.

"Looking forward to it," he lied.

***

 _Citizen Kane_ was worse than he expected, because it might be a masterpiece, but it was all about the kind of things that Mycroft was interested in - like rich Americans and newspapers and power - and was thus tedious by definition. About halfway through, when the tedious magnate and his tedious failed-opera singer of a wife were being tediously depressed in their tedious castle, Sherlock gave into temptation, grabbed the remote and switched it off.

"Oy, I was watching that," John said, slumping down even further in his chair.

"Do you know what I was doing today?" Sherlock said, rolling up his sleeve, to reveal the bandage on his arm.

"You went to see a man about a vole. Did one bite you? If so, I hope it hasn't caught anything nasty."

"Liverpool University have a project checking the effects of cowpox on field vole populations. They've been doing studies, infecting them and seeing the results. So, I persuaded them to infect me as well."

"What?"

"You will be glad to hear, John, that I now have cowpox. Which means that as soon as I recover, I will be immune from smallpox, and safe to go back to the eighteenth century. Edward Jenner would be proud of me."

"Well I'm not!" John yelled, and the row kicked off.

***

For a change, it was Sherlock who stormed off, unable to bear the hurt way in which John was looking at him, as if he'd somehow cheated. Which he had, of course, but surely John should be used to that by now? He wasn't sure why it upset John so much, or why it upset him so much that John was furious, and hurt, and disappointed with him. He just knew that he was going back to the eighteenth century, whatever John said, because who the hell cared what John thought? They had changed some of the key codes at the British Library, but not enough to keep him out. He went up to theTower, rested his head on its doors, not caring where he might go. Just mentally telling It – whatever It was – to take him somewhere, anywhere.

***

He walks out of the portal into a small fetid room with a couple of beds in it. A large shambling man springs up rather painfully from where he's been sitting, feeding a man in one of the beds.

"For God's sake, get out," he yells. "There's smallpox here."

"I've been inoculated," Sherlock replies. The Library's playing tricks on him, isn't it?

"Are you a doctor?" the young man asks.

"No. But I've...I've come to help nurse him." He doesn't quite know why he's said that, it's really not his area. But there's something about the man's smile that is peculiarly winning.

"Welcome to the Pest House, then," says the man, sticking out his hand. "Trooper Silas Tomkyn Comberbache of the 15th Light Dragoons, at your service."

"Sherlock Holmes," he replies, shaking Comberbache's hand.

"Oh, you've enlisted under a false name as well, have you? Though it hardly seems worth concealing who I am any more. The truth is, my name is Sam Coleridge. And what's your real name?"

***

From the torrent of wordsthat pour out of Sam in the next hour or two, Sherlock eventually manages to gain some hard data. It's 1794 and Sam's run away from Cambridge in disgrace. From the fact that Sam can see Sherlock, the disgrace probably involves drink and opium, although Sherlock is soon wondering if Sam's mind is scrambled enough even when clean to be conscious of time-travelling intruders. Why else would he decide to redeem his disgrace by trying to become a soldier like some of his brothers, rather than the idiotic, brilliant poet he's clearly intended to be? And why is he now cooped up in the Henley Pest House with boils on his buttocks and Trooper Henry Wilson to nurse through smallpox?

More to the point, what is Sherlock doing here? He tries to tell himself that there's some logic to how he's ended up meeting Sam. That the Tower, when his mind enters it, must also enter his mind, to ensure conservation of something or other. And that it would, of course, work by means of words, not simply ideas. So if he's got smallpox and Kane's Xanadu on his mind, that somehow maps to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Pest House in this world.But what is more alarming is the possibility that this is the Library's equivalent of Amazon's recommendations: 'People who attempt to save medieval manuscripts also like meeting Romantic poets'.

***

But the thing is, in a way, it's right. Sam's not the kind of man who Sherlock would normally have much in common with: he's never had time for would-be mystical poets with radical political views, let alone someone who can talk even more than he does. But right now, someone who's pleased that Sherlock's in the eighteenth century, can get through hours of discussion without ever mentioning tidying the flat, and is also the world's most incompetent soldier, has a strange appeal.

Sherlock ends up spending several weeks with various incarnations of Sam, and soon decides that early Coleridge is more fun than late Coleridge. Fortunately, Sam's dreaminess is such that he'll greet someone as an old acquaintance in 1791, even if he's first met them in 1794. Sherlock suspects that Sam secretly believes Sherlock's a hallucination. Certainly at one point, Sam seems deeply confused about the distinction between Sherlock, someone from Porlock, and a possibly hypothetical drinker of hemlock. That's also the evening that they have a particularly heated argument about whether a pleasure dome can really be stately and still remain pleasurable. It's the most fun Sherlock's ever had discussing scansion.

***

In contrast, when he did make it back to 221B occasionally, desperate for a clean shirt or a Marmite sandwich, John was always there, silently sulking. No, not sulking, you needed volatility to sulk properly. This was natural stubbornness, hardened further by years of army life. John might think that he was exhibiting patient, willing-to-be-reconciled- if you-apologise restraint, but the strong undertones of wanting to kill Sherlock with his bare hands were clear to the experienced observer. Sherlock half expected mugs to start exploding when John glared at them, and he wondered if his skin would start to blister and peel off if John was ever willing to look at him directly for more than a few seconds. He felt more and more like one of the thousand thousand slimy things that Sam kept complaining about seeing. Not even Sam would know what to say to John in that kind of mood, and he was probably the wrong sort of poet anyhow for that.

The next time he had to go back to the flat - he'd promised Sam the loan of a book with some decent photographs of albatrosses - he managed to turn up on Sunday afternoon, when John was normally at the gym. But as he turned into Baker Street he spotted John heading back to the flat, still in his shorts, despite the cold, talking on his phone. How did he know? Oh, Sherlock's mobile, of course. The GPS tracking feature had been safely randomised – not disabled, too obvious – but the fact that there was a signal at all was a telltale sign that Sherlock was back in the twenty-first century. Mycroft's doing, he feared. He switched his phone off reluctantly – it felt like having part of his brain surgically removed – and waited to see if John would leave the flat again. Eventually, however, he had to go in, and attempt to avoid the mutually assured destruction of saying anything to John. Then he headed rapidly back to Sam, who was, as usual, in a helpful, friendly mood.

***

It's because of Sam's helpfulness and friendliness that Sherlock nearly ends up an addict again. Sam used to help his brother out at the London Hospital, he saved Trooper Wilson's life, and he's frankly keener on nursing people than Sherlock thinks is entirely sane. So when Sherlock gets some kind of horrible stomach bug from some particularly dodgy milk, Sam happily starts dosing him with a variety of patent remedies. Several of which turn out to be full of laudanum.

Sherlock knows, from the pleasurable haze, from the feel of his limbs, what he's had, less of a rush than heroin, his body relaxing from its cramps for the first time in hours. He also knows, three days later, when he's starting to wonder what symptoms he should use next time to justify Sam giving him another dose, that he's in serious danger. If he doesn't get out of this century soon, he may not be able to. And some of the dreams he's been having suggest he really ought to get back to 221B and see whether _his_ subconscious has been picking up the right signals after all. But there's just one more thing he needs the laudanum for...

He leaves his mobile phone under the bed he's been sharing with Sam, so he won't forget and turn it on in the present. He knows the theoretical dangers of leaving advanced technology in a past time, but Sam has barely get to grips with the principle of the reflecting telescope, let alone anything involving electronics. He may not even notice the phone's there for weeks.

When he gets back to the British Library, Sherlock starts taking the drops of laudanum, hoping he can get the dosage right. Just enough for mild euphoria, not enough to slow him down or leave his pupils too dilated. Though he will have an excuse for that aspect of his appearance. Ideally, he'd be slightly less crumpled and sweaty as well to start with, but hopefully the state of his clothing isn't going to matter for too long. If he's got this right. If he hasn't, he might as well end up in Georgian London permanently, because the twenty-first century isn't worth it anymore.

Despite the high he's on, he manages to drift up the stairs of 221B almost noiselessly. Then he bangs open the flat door, and John starts and jumps up from the TV programme he's fallen asleep in front of. By the time John has got with it enough to start protesting, Sherlock, on a gloriously uninhibited wave of something that's not entirely laudanum-based, has got himself wrapped thoroughly enough round John's surprisingly responsive body for John's verbal protests to seem pointless even to John. In fact, they end up fairly rapidly with the kind of bed-sharing that Sherlock actually enjoys – fewer lice, softer pillows, and lots more fornication than in his experience of the eighteenth century.

***

It was unfortunate that John found the bottle of laudanum in Sherlock's coat pocket the next day. Sherlock wasn't sure he ever wanted to move again, but John had decided that someone needed to tidy up the discarded clothes in the living room before Mrs Hudson started deducing things. The resulting row was spectacular, but Sherlock barred the exit to the flat, so John couldn't storm out without manhandling Sherlock aside – and they both knew what was going to happen if they started grappling. John contented himself by smashing the bottle and its contents into the sink, and was then briefly distracted by worrying that he might be accidentally poisoning London's water supply. (John was far too conscientious, Sherlock thought, even when near to losing it completely).

John then tried to compensate for this conscientiousness by calling Sherlock every rude name he knew from the army. Sherlock half-heartedly retaliated by calling John an addle-brained sapskull, but he was really too content to do much more than stand around adoring John.

"You're going to have to choose between the drugs and me," John yelled at one point.

"Then I'll choose you, of course," Sherlock blurted out, and suddenly realised that was one promise he wasn't planning to weasel out of. John kept shouting at him for a bit longer, after that, because he had several weeks of fury to burn out, but they ended up with some reconciliatory sex, which made it the most enjoyable quarrel Sherlock had ever had with anyone.

 

***

It was a day or two later that it occurred to Sherlock that the 'no drugs' policy also meant no going back to the eighteenth century. Because now he knew the bliss lurking in every bottle of black-drop, paregoric, Godfrey's Cordial, Mother Bailey's Quieting Syrup and all the rest of them, and the temptation if he did go back would be just too much. Drugs were dangerous enough, but drugs and books were a lethal cocktail for him. After all, he'd once spent a month trying to work out how to synthesize soma, and he was already back on a chapter a day of De Quincey. Still, most people could manage without the Georgians; he should be able to as well. It was a shame he couldn't say goodbye to Sam, but he probably wouldn't have remembered him anyhow.

He did go and lay flowers on Sam's grave in Highgate, though – opium poppies, of course. And he had one more debt to pay. He sat in the atrium in the BL, and hand-wrote his thank-you letter andscrunched it into a tiny ball. And then he waited, till one of the fetchers went into the King's Library Tower, and he could throw the letter through the briefly opened doors. It was inadequate to express his feelings, of course, but it was at least words. And whatever he didn't know about the Tower - and would never know now - he did know it was keen on the written word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of the actual facts lurking in this about Coleridge are taken from Richard Holmes, _Coleridge: Early Visions_ (London, 1989). Rictor Norton's [website](http://rictornorton.co.uk/) has vast amounts of entertaining information about the C18 and its gay and non-gay history.


End file.
